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The Miracles of Realism

HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM — There’s an exchange in “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene’s novel about the damage American good intentions can cause, that I’ve thought about a lot. It involves Thomas Fowler, the world-weary journalist-narrator of the book, confronting Alden Pyle, an American aid worker with a blinding zeal to stop Communism.

“You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren’t interested.”

“They don’t want Communism.”

“They want enough rice. They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want.”

A little more than a half-century after Fowler’s succinct pronouncement, Vietnam has what he evoked: peace, stability and independence. It also has Communism, but of a form that allows a Vietnamese leader to ring the opening bell on Wall Street. The “white skins” still around have forsaken war for foreign investment.

Pyle’s zeal was also the Manichean change-the-world zeal of post-9/11 America, a disoriented nation striking out to deliver liberty, democracy and the rule of law to the Middle East and western Asia, but falling short and betraying those ideals in the process.

Good intentions have not lost their power to devastate or to mire the earnest bearers of them in the Hindu Kush.

So I’ve been thinking about Pyle, and his unhappy end, and thinking, too, of Fowler, whose realism is back in fashion in Barack Obama’s Washington, where “engagement” is the buzzword.

Vietnam’s success has been anchored in realism and engagement. This has allowed U.S.-Vietnamese relations to flourish less than 35 years after the end of a war that left more than 58,000 American troops and some 3 million Vietnamese dead. Defying the great recession, the economy here will grow at least 4 percent this year.

In recent weeks, Vietnamese generals and Defense Ministry officials were whisked out to the U.S.S. John C. Stennis aircraft carrier in the South China Sea for a tour that was a big hit. A handful of Vietnamese officers are receiving training in the United States: so much for domino theories.

Since a bilateral trade accord was signed in 2001, the United States has become Vietnam’s largest export market. The likes of Intel and Victoria’s Secret do big business in a country that’s Communist and proud of it.

Vietnam teaches several lessons, the first of which is that the United States can have normal relations with countries whose political systems and ideologies it rejects. That is as true of Cuba and Iran today as it was of Vietnam or China. For all America’s painful histories with Cuba and Iran, they do not include a war within living memory.

In the Shanghai communiqué of February 27, 1972, which announced the breakthrough between the United States and Communist China after 24 years of non-communication, Richard Nixon and Zhou Enlai concluded:

“There are essential differences between China and the United States in their social systems and foreign policies. However, the two sides agreed that countries, regardless of their social systems, should conduct their relations on the principles of respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states, nonaggression against other states, noninterference in the internal affairs of other states, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.”

Now Obama has returned to “mutual respect” in exploring whether the cold war’s hangover in Havana can be overcome and the 30-year impasse with Tehran. The president’s motto might be: “Give me facts.” I applaud it.

There remains the mystery of Vietnamese forgiveness. Of course, a victor can always be magnanimous. But that’s not enough of an explanation — at least not for someone more familiar with Balkan and Middle Eastern memory, whose capacity to generate new violence from past wounds is fathomless.

Nor is the youth of Vietnam’s population, more than 70 percent of them born after the war, sufficient reason for the relegation of the past. The young can also be full of a thirst for vengeance, as some are in Gaza.

No, only culture, that inadequate word, can explain Vietnam’s ability to look forward. In Buddhism and Confucianism, which suffuse Vietnamese life, the present and future are prized.

Ancestor worship is also near universal, with small shrines to a family’s forbears adorning many homes. I asked Kenneth Fairfax, the U.S. consul general whose office is on the site of the desperate rooftop American evacuation of April 1975, how an ancestor is viewed, perhaps one killed by a foreign enemy?

“When your photo’s up there 50 years from now, you want to be remembered for making the generation after you, and the one after that, more prosperous,” Fairfax said.

I don’t know how to transplant that notion to the Middle East. I do know Obama has to reject Pyle — “They don’t want Communism” — for Fowler — “They want enough rice” — to advance his vision of a more peaceful world.